A Message From the Dean

It is my pleasure to share with you the 2024 Dean’s Report for the Temerty Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto. The report is an overview of our activities in the last academic year, as Canada’s largest faculty of medicine and one of the most productive health sciences hubs in North America. Scroll through the report and you’ll find feature stories on our work and people, who are shaping the future of medicine and health care; a progress update on the goals of our academic strategic plan; and Vitals, with performance metrics including our global rankings, education enrolment and research output.

For those of you who don’t know me, let me introduce myself. I began my term as dean of Temerty Medicine and vice provost, relations with health-care institutions in July — after eight years of outstanding leadership from Professors Trevor Young and Patricia Houston, as dean and interim dean, respectively. I am a graduate of our medical school, a paediatric nephrologist, and a discovery and translational researcher with a focus on kidney disease and transplant. I am a clinician-scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children, and have served as vice dean of strategy and operations and co-chair of the finance committee at Temerty Medicine. I have also been privileged to hold leadership roles with the Society for Pediatric Research and the American Pediatric Society.

For those who do know me, you’ll know that my approach to leadership is collaborative, data-driven and people-focused. I have met with many faculty, learners, staff, alumni and donors in the past few months, and learned about your concerns, achievements and hopes for the future. We clearly face challenges as a Faculty, from the ongoing effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, to fiscal pressures and the growing complexity of health care and medical science. But I am moved by the ideas and passion that many of you bring to solve these and other problems every day, across our departments and partner institutions. And I am excited by what more we can do to realize our research potential and empower our people.

In the coming year, we will begin a strategic planning process to set new goals, building on our existing academic plan. Work is already underway on several priorities, many identified by you in consultation with our leadership teams. These include solidifying and expanding our clinician-scientist training programs; supporting and harmonizing career development for graduate students across our life sciences departments; and better recognizing the effort and expertise of our faculty members, in a wide range of clinical and research sites. We also continue to plan for construction of the James and Louise Temerty Building on the current site of the Medical Sciences Building’s west wing, and to develop better performance metrics to track progress on key goals, relative to peer institutions.

I look forward to advancing these and other priorities, and to meeting many more of you across our Temerty Medicine community this fall.

Lisa Robinson, MD, FRCPC, FCAHS
Dean, Temery Faculty of Medicine
Vice Provost, Relations with Health-Care Institutions, University of Toronto